Making other plans, or why the Conservatives hate question period

On Wednesday, Conservative government House leader Peter Van Loan started his end-of-sitting press conference with a somewhat bizarre statement. Riffing off the John Lennon quote that “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” Van Loan told reporters that he was there to report that in the House of Commons this year, “results are what happened while others were busy focused on question period.”

He repeated the sentiment a moment later.

“Our government has delivered on what matters to Canadians: creating jobs, growth and long term prosperity in the House of Commons,” he said. “We’ve been working hard to strengthen our economy, create jobs and support Canadian families. While others have been focused on the theatre of question period, we have been focused on delivering results for Canadians.”

As with other parts of his statement that day, this is worth unpacking a bit, especially as we sit a week away from the party’s convention in Calgary (should it not still prove to be too wet and/or soggy to hold there), because it speaks to what the current weaknesses of the Conservative name, its ethos, and its team.

If you are a Conservative grassroots sitting at home, you ought to be angry. Angry first that, as Andrew Coyne summarized Friday, your party has all but abandoned what were once its most prized platform points (accountability and transparency being the most egregiously thrown to the wood-chipper lately), and second that your champion man, Stephen Harper, and his strong, stable majority government is having its lunch eaten by someone like Thomas Mulcair. Or – worse still – Justin Trudeau.

This is what made Van Loan’s dismissal of question period Wednesday so funny. No kidding the Conservatives don’t like it. It is, after all, where they are most consistently battered and beaten, and where they are equally most consistently disingenuous and simple-minded. It is where they most obviously laugh in the face of everyone who voted for them with the hope they could change how Ottawa works. It is where they show themselves for what they are so often: brutish, tone-deaf and callous. And it is where they do also often create “jobs,” “growth,” and “long term prosperity,” but mostly in a meaningless sense – more as conceptual slogans than anything else.

Most importantly, though, it’s where of late the New Democrats have most lavishly dined out on the Conservative brand. Mulcair has shown a prosecutorial vigour that, while itself theatric, looked for a time to be everything the Conservatives once said they were. When the House returned after the break week during which the news broke that the prime minister’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had paid Senator Mike Duffy $90,000, Mulcair asked questions that probed for light and demanded accountability. Sort of like how the Conservatives used to. And what could the prime minister do? Answer placidly (though technically perhaps truthfully) at first, and then depart, leaving James Moore and Pierre Poilievre to hurl some mud. Probably not the kind of accountability conservatives once hoped might exist in Ottawa.

Further to that point, those recent question period interrogations weren’t just a shaming at the hands of opposition leaders, but a shaming at the hands of one official Opposition leader whom most polled seem to generally regard as being about as grey and bland as his new party signage, and another who despite his complete lack of substantive policy proposals or tangible vision for the country leads the government in polling by wider and wider margins every week. And they’re both from Quebec.

It looks pretty bad, then, for Conservatives who will walk into Calgary’s Telus Convention Centre Thursday to start talking about where the party is, where it is going, and how it might get there. Right?

As it stands, there are only two existing policy resolutions sitting on the potential agenda for the convention that mention the word “accountability.” One has to do with public service benefit and pension packages (that they ought to be comparable to those in the private sector), and the other deals with accountability in determining who receives science technology and innovation grants. There are a few more that mention “transparency,” but those that demand it of the government only do so with regard to how it handles its Aboriginal and foreign investment files. And while there are a handful of constitutional resolutions that ask that the party exercise more transparency and accountability vis-à-vis its own members, it remains to be seen whether any introduced on the convention floor might ask the party to be more so when it comes to MP and Senator expenses, for example. Or perhaps with regard to releasing budgetary details to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

The party allows resolutions from the floor to be introduced, so perhaps those issues will come up that way. They might even decide to ask the party to reassert its commitment to one of its own standing policy points – that is, that the Conservative party believes “that good and responsible government is attentive to the people it represents and has representatives who at all times conduct themselves in an ethical manner and display integrity, honesty and concern for the best interest of all.” That is, of course, if anyone actually still wants it to.

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Items to watch for at the convention next week:

• Party leadership rules: The debate will again pop up over how the party ought to vote for its leader. When the Progressive Conservative party merged with the Canadian Alliance in 2003, it was agreed that each riding would have equal voice in a leadership vote. That was in an effort to keep the eastern riding associations – often made up of far fewer individuals than those in the west – happy. Defence Minister Peter MacKay has already floated the idea that some people would leave the Conservative party if that were to change, and a weighted system introduced. He even told the National Post that he’d “think about it” too, and that the party would be “very different… with a very different future.”

• Gender selection: The Langley electoral district association (think Mark Warawa, MP) has put forward a resolution on women that, as its fourth point, specifies that, if adopted, it would have the Conservative party condemn “discrimination against girls through gender selection.” This is what Warawa said was the basis for his now-famously silenced members statement, and what would have apparently led us to another debate on abortion – something the prime minister has repeatedly said he does not want to discuss again.

• Union accountability: A slew of resolutions introduced from all over the country would compel the party to adopt stances on unions. These range from empowering workers with “protections against forced union dues for political and social causes that are unrelated to the workplace;” to making unions more transparent to their members; to resolving that “right to work legislation” should allow for “optional union membership including student unions”; to restructuring the Rand formula to protect workers rights to not associate “with broad political positions that they deem oppressive to their respective personal identities.”